


we found love (right where we are)

by ailurea



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Cooking, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:07:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23748847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ailurea/pseuds/ailurea
Summary: Keith's a bit nervous about cooking dinner with Shiro for the first time because, well, when it comes to cooking, he really only knows the bare minimum. But, as always, Shiro makes everything easy.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 30
Kudos: 187





	we found love (right where we are)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [naarna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/naarna/gifts).



> for naarna, who requested some sheith cooking and accidental _i love you_ s ♥  
> this was such a sweet prompt, and i hope you enjoy the fic!

“Oh,” Keith says when he steps into Shiro’s kitchen. He puts his bag of tangerines on the counter. It’s his first time here for a formal meal kind of thing, so he thought it’d be an appropriate gift, but it feels like a paltry offering in response to the—everything, that Shiro has going on here.

There are various appliances sitting out on the counter, and bowls and bags and boxes on the island in the center. Shiro’s standing in front of the sink, washing out some empty glass storage containers.

“Keith!” Shiro wipes his hands on the towel hanging in front of the sink and comes to greet him, drawing him in by his elbows for a kiss. “Hi.”

“Hey.” Keith smiles, wrapping his arms around Shiro’s waist and kissing him again, just because he can. He’s never going to tire of it. “There’s, um. There’s kind of a lot going on here, huh?”

Shiro turns in his arms and looks around the kitchen as if taking it all in for the first time. “Oh. Oh, I guess so. Sorry, I wanted to get everything ready before you got here, but maybe I got a bit carried away.”

Keith thinks he should have expected something like this, seeing as Shiro asked him to show up at a little past 1pm to start making dinner. “No, don’t worry about it. So, um, how many dishes are we making here?”

“Just one,” Shiro says, stepping back a bit. “Ever had homemade ramen?”

Keith’s not sure he’s had ramen that wasn’t from a styrofoam cup. “Sounds complicated.”

“It’s not so bad,” Shiro says. “But it does get a bit more involved if you decide to make everything from scratch.”

“Which we’re doing?” Keith says. Because the kitchen definitely looks involved.

“Which we’re doing,” Shiro says. “But don’t worry, I’ve done all the start-this-a-week-in-advance stuff already, and the rest of it shouldn’t be too much for us to tackle.“

“Wait, a week in advance?” Keith says. The most patient-cooking thing he’s done is take the eggs out of the fridge to get them room temperature before baking later in the same day, and even then he always forgets and tries to cheat it by dunking the eggs in warm water. He can’t imagine getting something ready for cooking a week later.

“Good food takes time!” Shiro says with a grin. “Says my parents, anyways. But I’ve found it’s true, for the most part.”

“Well, I’m definitely not as good a cook as either you or your parents,” Keith says. “But I can at least do things you tell me to. I think. Probably.”

“You’ll be fine,” Shiro says warmly. “Every hand helps.” He takes a step back, out of Keith’s arms. “So, I was thinking we should get started with the broth first, since we’ll want that going for about five hours, and then we can work on the other stuff while we wait.”

“Five hours,” Keith says. He tried making tomato sauce from scratch once, during one of the few times he’s gotten adventurous. It took maybe forty-five minutes, which was already way too long.

“It’ll go by like nothing,” Shiro says. “What do you feel like doing? We have to chop the ginger and garlic, and some green onions.”

“Uh, sure, I can do the green onions?” Keith says. “Sorry if they don’t end up looking very nice.”

“Hey, you don’t have to apologize, okay?” Shiro says as he passes over the bowl of green onions. “It’s just us. And it doesn’t matter what it looks like, it’s all just going to end up in our stomachs anyways.”

“Sorry,” Keith says, and stops himself before he apologizes for apologizing again. “I just—I guess I’ve never tried making an actual dish before, so this all feels like… a lot. If that makes sense.”

Keith knows his way around a kitchen well enough, but when he makes food, he does it at the most basic level—to survive, not to savor. Having a meal be an entire afternoon’s labor is… new. Not bad, necessarily. But definitely different. More than a little intimidating.

“No, that makes sense,” Shiro says. He pauses for a moment. “We could make something else if—“

“No,” Keith says. “I want to try it. With you. If that’s okay.”

Shiro smiles. “There’s nothing I’d like more.”

* * *

There’s something mesmerizing about the way that Shiro works in the kitchen.

Shiro’s always teasing Keith about how he gets when he’s focused, but Keith thinks Shiro gets just as intense, if not more, when he’s turned his entire focus into doing a task, and doing it well.

Keith’s got his own job to do—Shiro’s given him instructions on how much to wash and cut, and how finely to do it—but he finds he can’t look away from Shiro’s side of the counter.

10% of him is distracted just by Shiro’s forearm. Sheer physical attraction is something that Keith has never experienced before Shiro, and it’s very hard not to just spend the entire time staring at the flex of his muscles. 

The other 90% is distracted by how much Shiro clearly knows what he’s doing. His movements when he chops the garlic are practiced, precise, efficient—aided, surely, by the Altean hand. Pieces move under his blade with a speed that Keith’s only ever seen on a screen.

Shiro has all the garlic and ginger chopped into perfectly tiny pieces and in two neat little stacks before he glances over at Keith.

Keith, caught, turns to his barely-chopped green onions.

“You okay?” Shiro says, setting his knife on the counter and walking towards him.

“Yeah, fine.” Keith glances at him. “Your, uh. Your chopping is really nice.”

Shiro laughs, and it sounds a little self-conscious. “Oh, thanks? It’s not that nice, but—“

“I can literally see your perfectly-chopped garlic right there,” Keith says as he sets to lining up the green onions again. “I’m sure you worked hard to get good at it, so you might as well own it. Isn’t that what you’re always telling me?”

“Hey.” Shiro gives him a mock scowl. “You can’t use my own lessons against me like that.”

Keith grins. “Too bad, just did.”

Shiro hip checks him. “Brat.”

“I learned from the best.”

Shiro gapes at him for a moment, then shakes his head. “Wow. I see how it is. I invite you here, into my home, my kitchen—“

“Shiro, oh my god.”

“—the very center of my heart, just for you to stab me in it,” Shiro says, putting the back of his hand to his forehead and sighing. “I don’t know if I’ll ever recover.”

Coming from anyone else, Keith thinks he’d be annoyed at this kind of display; coming from Shiro, it makes him feel unbearably fond. “Would a kiss help?”

Shiro grins, looking a lot more like his normal, non-dramatic self again. “A kiss would help, yes.”

Keith sets down his knife and turns toward Shiro, going on tiptoes to meet him halfway for a brief, but firm kiss.

It’s not a new sensation anymore, not a full month into their relationship, but Keith still feels like he’s floating on air every time. When Shiro pulls back, his expression is impossibly soft, and Keith has to kiss him again just because of it.

Then Shiro pulls back again, for real, laughing. “As much as I’d love to keep going, we really do need to finish this part up or else we won’t have any broth for our noodles.”

“Right, five-hour broth,” Keith says. “How could I forget?”

“Back to work!” Shiro says, and pats his butt before heading back to his side of the counter.

Keith will get him back for that later. For now, he turns back to his task.

It doesn’t take him too long to finish it up, now that Shiro’s bending over a pot and not being distractingly competent with a knife, and Shiro gives him two thumbs up for his efforts before dumping it into the pot with the rest of the ingredients.

“So that’s that,” Shiro says as he sets a timer on his phone. He claps his hands together. “Ready to get started on the noodles?”

“Lead the way,” Keith says.

The noodles turn out to be not as complicated as Keith feared, just time-consuming. It’s pretty much like baking—water, salt, and baking soda; sift the flour and mix it all together until it starts looking like a dough.

The surprising part comes when Shiro tosses the mixture into a bag, wraps it up in a towel, plops it onto the ground, and says, “Now we step on it.”

Keith looks between Shiro’s face and the lump of dough on the ground and tries to decide if he’s serious.

Shiro puts one foot onto the dough ball, then another, squishing it into more of a flat shape the size of a medium pizza that he then starts to massage with his feet. “It’s pretty thick, so it can be pretty hard to knead with your hands,” he says. “It actually ends up being a lot better this way. Try it?”

He steps off, and holds out his hands to help Keith step on.

It’s a bit of an awkward start, but Keith eventually gets into a rhythm of stepping that he thinks is actually doing something productive. “Like this?”

“Just like that.” Shiro’s still holding his hands, and he squeezes them lightly and smiles. “It’s a bit like we’re dancing, right?”

Keith smiles back. “Just missing the music.”

“Well,” Shiro says, “that can be fixed.”

And then he starts singing—

“ _When your legs don’t work like they used to before, and I can’t sweep you off of your feet._ ”

“Shiro!” Keith laughs as Shiro picks up him and sweeps him around, swapping their places and just narrowly avoiding bumping them into the counter.

Shiro sways them dramatically to his music. “ _Will your mouth still remember the taste of my love? Will your eyes still smile from your cheeks?_ ” He grabs Keith’s face, squishing his cheeks as he sings the last line, and Keith flushes and squishes his face in return.

Shiro doesn’t let that deter him, singing with a squished voice as he kneads on the dough, “ _And darling I will be loving you ‘til we’re seventyyyy._ ”

He switches their places again. “ _And, baby, my heart could still fall as hard at twenty-threeee!_ ” he sings, slapping a hand over his chest in dramatic fashion. He gives Keith a look, and Keith fakes a sigh and joins in:

“ _And I'm thinking 'bout how people fall in love in mysterious ways, maybe just the touch of a hand—_ ”

Shiro pulls Keith’s hands to his lips and kisses it with a wink, and Keith flushes in response.

“ _Well, me, I fall in love with you every single day, and I just wanna tell you I am. So honey now—_ ” Shiro grabs onto Keith and spins him again, and he gets way too close to the counter before Shiro catches him and pulls him back so that they’re both standing flush together, arms wrapped around each other, the dough squished beneath them.

Keith loves Shiro. He loves him so much, and he’s never been able to say it, but it’s so much easier to do like this, under the veil of playfulness and song lyrics. It’s so easy to hold onto Shiro, to squish the dough under their feet and sway and sing:

“ _Take me into your loving arms, kiss me under the light of a thousand stars, place your head on my beating heart, I’m thinking out loud—”_

Keith touches Shiro’s cheek and sings the words he never dares to say.

_“Maybe we found love right where we are.”_

* * *

“Okay,” Keith says, after all is said and done. “This is good.”

He’d meant to say it after his first bite of noodle and broth, but it really was so good that he couldn’t stop for a good few minutes. He’s not used to enjoying food, not like this. He cooked to survive, and he ate to survive, too.

Most of this was definitely Shiro’s work, but still, he can’t believe that they made this and that they’re now eating it and that it’s so damn delicious.

Shiro grins and slurps down his own spoonful. “So, what do you think? Worth the time and effort?”

“I guess it wasn’t that bad,” Keith says. Even if they’d ended up dancing on the noodles for well over an hour because they kept getting distracted and messing around. But he definitely doesn’t regret that, either. He glances at Shiro and adds, “Especially because I got to spend it with you.”

“Yeah, me too.” Shiro clears his throat. His face is a little pink. “I mean, I’m glad that I got to do it with you. My parents both really enjoyed cooking, so we’d all spend a lot of time in the kitchen together, just making different things. I, uh—I guess it’s just part of what family time means to me.”

“Oh,” Keith says, and that’s all he can say, because—oh. _Oh_.

It’s been obvious from the moment he stepped into the kitchen that Shiro’s spent a fair amount of time in the kitchen, improving at his various culinary skills. And it also didn’t take much for Keith to figure out it was something he picked up from his parents. Shiro mentioned tips he’d learned from them more than a few times, and Keith also noticed him going to a corner of the kitchen and consulting a time-worn, crinkled notebook, filled with notes written in a hand that Keith didn’t recognize.

But to have it laid out so plainly that, to Shiro, his kitchen time is his family time, and that he’s explicitly invited Keith into this space—that means something.

That means a lot of somethings.

“So,” Shiro says, shoving his spoon and chopsticks back into his bowl with a clatter, and Keith realizes he’s been quiet for too long. “So, uh. You think you’d want to make this again?”

It’s a change of subject, but Keith doesn’t know what to say anyways, so he lets Shiro have it.

He reaches out with his leg and hooks his foot around Shiro’s ankle. “Only with you,” he says softly. “And maybe we should buy the noodles next time. I mean, it was fun, but also we were stepping on that thing for a really long time.”

Shiro laughs. “All right, that’s fair. Actually, do you wanna know a secret?”

“Don’t tell me you have a machine,” Keith says.

“Even better,” Shiro says, and he takes a dramatic pause. “I actually do just use store-bought noodles, pretty much all of the time. Going for the handmade ones is just to show off.”

“Okay, new relationship rule,” Keith says, “no more showing off. My body won’t survive it. Don’t say it.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything!” Shiro says, which is a total lie because it’s very rare that Shiro turns down the opportunity for a bad pun or a bad innuendo. “But if I was going to say something—“

“Uh-huh.”

“If I was going to say something,” Shiro continues, grinning, “I would have just said that that’s unfair, because my favorite thing to do is show off for you. I know you like it when I work out.”

Keith’s not really into the whole… posturing thing. But it’s true that it’s a good look on Shiro. Keith really does make a lot of exceptions for Shiro, but he finds that he doesn’t really mind it.

“It’s negotiable,” he says finally.

Shiro’s grin grows wider. “I look forward to our negotiations.”

Keith snorts and kicks him lightly. “Dork.”

“That’s me!”

They go back to their bowls, eating in silence for a few moments while Keith gathers his thoughts. He doesn’t know exactly what he wants to say, but he doesn’t want to let what Shiro said earlier go unacknowledged.

Tonight means something to him. He needs to know it means something to Keith, too.

“Hey, Shiro.” Keith nudges their feet together. “Thank you for inviting me to do this with you. It was… it was really nice.”

He cringes internally. Maybe he should’ve thought that one through a bit more.

But Shiro just smiles softly and rubs his foot along the back of Keith’s ankle, as Keith did earlier. “I’m really glad you had fun. My parents always said that the only thing better than being able to cook the food you love is being able to do it with the people you love. I believe every word of it.”

“Oh.” Keith swallows, mouth and throat suddenly dry, because this isn’t like before, when they were playing around. This is serious. Shiro’s serious. “You—love me?”

“I—“ Shiro looks taken aback, like he hadn’t realized he’d said it.

Oh god Keith, he was just quoting his parents, way to make it awkward. “Sorry, I—“

“I love you,” Shiro says. “Is that okay?”

Keith exhales, and it feels like he’s been holding his breath for hours. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“I don’t know, too much, too soon?” Shiro says. “Like this dinner. I realized halfway through we should’ve just made fried rice or something, but…”

Shiro looks like he’s still gathering his thoughts, so Keith waits for him to finish.

“I don’t know, I guess… Making a meal like this isn’t something you do on your own, just for yourself, you know?” Shiro says. “It’s meant to be shared with other people. And I guess I just really wanted to share it with you. I want to share everything with you.”

“Me too,” Keith says. “I love you, too.”

They sit there, gazing at each other, and suddenly the table seems much too large, the space between them far too wide. Keith untangles their feet and rounds the table, and Shiro turns to face him. Keith puts his hands on Shiro’s shoulders to support himself as he slips a knee onto the chair between Shiro’s legs and leans down to kiss him.

“I love you,” Keith says again, quietly. “I love you.”

It’s like the kisses—now that he’s said it, now that he knows he can say it, he feels like he can’t stop. He’s going to say it every day, every morning, every night.

And no words have ever felt more right.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to [faia](https://ao3.org/users/FaiaSakura) and [allie](https://ao3.org/users/artenon) for beta reading!
> 
> and thank you so much for reading! ♥  
> i love, appreciate, and reply to all comments, even if it takes me a little while to get to them :)
> 
> catch me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/ailurea)!


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